EFI PSI Adds Value and Efficiency to McCormick-Armstrong Operations

Friday, September 17, 2004

Press release from the issuing company

Foster City, Calif. – September 16, 2004 –EFI (Nasdaq: EFII), the world leader in digital imaging and print management solutions for commercial and enterprise printing, today announced that McCormick-Armstrong, a web and sheetfed printing operation in Wichita, KS, is using EFI PSI to improve job planning and tracking, and to increase productivity and profitability. EFI PSI is one of the industry’s leading management systems designed for the growing commercial printer with sheet, web and/or flexo equipment.
In 1999, McCormick-Armstrong had a largely manual print management system with on-the-fly job planning and hand-written time cards and job tickets. Add in Y2K concerns, and the company decided to replace their inefficient systems with a fully integrated management information system. They spent three months evaluating solutions and chose EFI PSI because it offered the greatest functionality and flexibility for the price.
PSI supports every phase of production and business management at McCormick-Armstrong – the company employs modules for estimating, job planning, shop floor data collection, purchasing, and inventory.
Better job planning and tracking, increased cash flow
PSI has made a night-and-day difference in job planning, CFO Edith Loughmiller says. “Under our old system, job planning was done on the fly. Perhaps we ordered paper. Now it’s comprehensive.”
Today, PSI’s job planning system automatically chooses the best layout, calculates waste and running speeds, selects the most efficient press, determines production times for scheduling, computes material requirements and updates pricing. PSI’s built-in intelligence enables budget analysis, automated change orders and other key capabilities for every job.
“PSI has changed our corporate culture,” Loughmiller says. “Now jobs are visible and easily tracked. Costs are easier to document and control. Departments work with each other instead of against each other.”
As the financial manager, Loughmiller is particularly impressed with PSI’s contribution to speedy invoicing. “PSI has enabled us to reduce our billing lag time – the time elapsed between job shipment and invoicing – from 13 days to 1.8 days. Our profitability and cash flows have improved tremendously with PSI.”
Value added measurements and reports
Managers at McCormick-Armstrong are impressed with PSI’s ability to monitor value added, which is the sales price minus all buyouts, like ink, paper or film, but not payroll. Figuring value added shows the cash flow that is netted on each job. Says Loughmiller, “Value added measurements are built into the design of PSI reports so that during every stage – from estimating and planning right through profitability reporting – the factors impacting each print job’s value added are clearly evident. That was a very attractive feature to us. At the time we didn’t realize it would be the most important feature to us. It has really helped our profitability. Since we installed PSI, value added, as a percent of sales, has increased 8.9 percentage points, which we consider to be remarkable.”
“The reporting capabilities of the PSI system and the extensive SQL database have become critical to our operations,” she adds. “The SQL database has allowed us to create reports to manage critical performance benchmarks such as value added, billing lag, and employee productivity, additions to work-in-progress, spoiled work and authors’ alterations. PSI gives us tools to support improved decision making at every step in the process.”
For more information on PSI, please visit www.efi.com/products/psi/